TDK Looking to Double Hard Drive Capacity

Storage, both HDD and SSD, is growing in capacity and shrinking in price all of the time. With hard drives currently as large as 2 TB available, and promises of even bigger ones coming it seems there is almost more storage already than anyone of needs. Plus, for those willing to pay a premium, there are SSD’s, which are smaller in capacity, but much faster in read time. Plus, we have even heard vague rumors of holographic storage coming in the future.

Now, from the future technologies department comes some news that TDK, the once famous cassette tape maker, has a technology that could double the storage capacity of a hard drive by using laser heaters to write the data. TDK calls the technology HAMR – heat-assisted magnetic recording. The laser needs to be combined with a new way of making the drive platters. Supposedly TDK has used the technology with platters that would normally have held 1 TB of data and successfully stored 2 TB on them.

It sounds very futuristic, and honestly it is. There is no release date for the technology, no idea of how such drives would be priced in comparison to a standard drive, and no real idea if this technology will ever even hit the market. Frankly, beyond this one report from the Register, there is really no concrete evidence of this technology existing. But the science of storage is always moving ahead at a fast pace, so it’s likely that such things as this are at least being tested.